Palantir's AIPCon 10, Ramp Hits $44B, 60 Minutes Considers Rogan | Diet TBPN

Next, we are live from Palantir AIPCon. Big news from RAMP today. Massive fundraise. We're going to cover it in a little bit, but first—

You hear that?

We've got to talk— Oh, is it still going? I like it. The RAMP song's back. This was early days. We really talked about RAMP so much. Turned into a song. The topic of conversation in DC has— it's still in AI world, but instead of talking about approving models before they're released. Today it's about the bio threat. Brandon Gorrell wrote in the TBP newsletter today, the great houses of AI have united behind the bio threat. There's actually a lot more to that because it was a big long list of signatories from AI, but also from the bio world and biotech and even startups. We've seen former guests of the show sign on. I'm excited to bring some of those folks back on the show in the coming weeks and hear more about this because I have this belief that as AI advanced. We got cyber because it was such a tight feedback loop, such a tight verifiable reward. Reinforcement learning works really well in that context. Bio has some similar characteristics.

And it was a very tangible Y2K-style moment. Exactly. Where there was, let's just say, powerful business strategy.

Yeah. Is it? Yeah. It was like, is it over? You start thinking about the consequences of this and you don't need to get to AGI super intelligence god, you can just have a really powerful tool that creates a new problem. And that creates full employment for Nikesh Arora over at Palo Alto Networks, who we had a chance to talk to yesterday. And he's been very fortunate in implementing the solutions to the cybersecurity threats posed by new AI systems, some of the new AI capabilities that are rolling out. But bio might be next. And so it's exciting to see that the great houses of AI are uniting behind the bio threat. So let's take you through this. So in 1981, a group of researchers published the primary structure of the poliovirus genome in the journal Nature. So they were basically open sourcing the sequence for making polio, which just a few years earlier, polio I think was on the decline by 1981, but a very, very problematic virus. It's an RNA virus, meaning that its nucleobases or building blocks are A, C, G, U, if you're familiar with RNA, adenosine, cytosine, guanine, and uracil. Put more plainly, Thanks, Brandon Garel. He says, when the researchers published the primary structure of the poliovirus, they gave the world the literal sequence of poliovirus building blocks in order from start to finish. By the mid-20th century, before mass vaccination, polio was paralyzing and killing more than half a million people per year worldwide. So you have this pretty deadly virus killing more than half a million people per year worldwide, and you have just open sourced it. What happens? So in 2002, researchers synthesized infectious poliovirus from its publicly available sequence data. So they didn't actually need any of the poliovirus RNA to start. They didn't need it on hand. They didn't need to, it's not like they took a little sample and they just cloned it up and made it bigger. They just took the data and they made the actual virus. So this is the shape of the threat. If there's a new virus or an existing virus or a forgotten about virus and you have the code to it, you can potentially print that RNA and then have the virus in your hands even if you don't have a sample. Instead, These researchers in 2002, they were able to take the published sequence, chemically synthesize short DNA fragments, assemble them into a full-length DNA copy of the poliovirus genome, and then use the DNA to make the viral RNA to fully recover the infectious virus. So in 2005, researchers used these same technologies to reconstruct the Spanish flu, a virus in 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans and had a 2 to 3% mortality rate among those infected. Very, very dangerous stuff. So basically, these two reconstructed viruses showed that having a physical virus on hand was no longer necessary as source material to create viruses. All you needed was the blueprints. As long as you have the code, literally just like text in a text file, a bunch of ATGU, you can go and make this as long as you have the equipment on hand. But that is getting democratized as well. And that's what this AI letter is all about. So that's the situation that we're still in today, except now that we have AI, there are easier ways to potentially reconstruct DNA sequences that could create new viruses. So yesterday, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Dario Ahmadi, Alex Wang, and dozens of other high-profile leaders across AI, tech policy, nucleic acid synthesis, and biotech signed an open letter called In Support of Mandatory Nucleic Acid Synthesis Screening and Record-Keeping. You might have seen it on the timeline. And at first glance, Brandon here assumed, and I assumed the same thing, assumed it was another press release from a frontier lab claiming it had just discovered new capabilities in one of its internal models that would ultimately lead to catastrophe. A lot of this, like, doom, fear-based marketing has been happening. So that was sort of the natural reaction.

And that's what I think some people's reaction would be. Were we not doing record keeping here already?

That's a great question. And Brandon actually did answer that. But it's not just a PR stunt and it's not a new capability. They're not saying that the models can just create a novel virus, you know, one shot like that, that, that is solved yet. It's not there. But they see it as something that's coming down the pipe. And this letter is not this dangerous new capability. It's more asking the US government to force nucleic acid synthesis companies to screen orders for sequences of concern. So, hey, somebody just ordered this, looks a lot like a virus. Like, what are we doing here? You said that you were trying to treat cancer, or you said that you were, you know, trying to make a new peptide, and all of a sudden you're asking for poliovirus or something that looks like poliovirus. Like, let's dig into this. That's where they're going with that. They also need to verify the legitimacy of the customer and to keep a record of what they're sending and to whom. That's a crazy one that I'm sure you're like, wait, they weren't keeping records? They were a little bit. He gets into this. So he says, the reason the letter is coming out now is that the threat of nucleic acid synthesis sequencing getting into the wrong hands has been enhanced by AI. So anyone with an AI tool in the future could in theory, if the models don't have safeguards on them, could create a sequence that then they go to a nucleic acid sequence company, get printed, send it to them, mix it up, boom, they got a virus. Not good. So most of the global nucleic acid synthesis industry has already signed up to do some of this. They started this in 2009 with what's called the International Gene Synthesis Consortium. And roughly 80% of commercial synthesis is on board, but membership in the consortium—

Okay, so 20% still just hanging out now. We're good.

80% of nuclear weapons are safely stored. Don't ask about the other 20%. That's kind of what this letter is getting at, because 80%, it was a good first effort, 2009. It's been 16, 17 years. We haven't had— yeah, but there's a new reason to go further. Let's get that last 20%. That's what they're asking for. Membership is not a strong guarantee that they're actually screening or keeping records of their customers because it's voluntary. The 80% number is also self-reported. For example, and a bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flimsiness of the agreement. So it's not—

So you can opt into this program by just saying that you're opting into it, but then even the reporting once you're opted in is voluntary.

So I think the way this works is the International Gene Synthesis Consortium is probably a nonprofit NGO, you know, non-governmental organization. All the companies, they volunteer 80% of commercial synthesis volume has opted into this. And then this organization, the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, they say, hey, we've looked at the market and we're covering— about 80% has opted into this. We're on board with 80%. And, and the government isn't coming in and checking the records. They're not actually saying, okay, well, we, we have a different number because we're the government and you have your— this number, let's verify this number. It's self-reported by that organization, but there's no reason not to trust that organization as A bunch of other factors contribute to the relative flimsiness of this agreement. HHS also has guidance in place around the issue, but again, it's voluntary, meaning that the possibility of bad actors getting their hands on dangerous nucleic acid sequences, at least from American companies, still cannot be ruled out. Overall, it's good to see industry leaders signing this letter, and doubly refreshing that the letter is not yet another warning of apocalyptic AI doom, which I think the public has unfortunately come to expect from announcements like this. Hopefully the relevant legislators are paying attention and can make this happen in short order. So I thought that was a good breakdown and I agree with a lot of that. Andrew Curran also has some deep dive on this with some more of the signatories. He shares screenshots of all of these and it really is everyone. Yeah, Y Combinator, DeepMind, Microsoft, Interconnect AI, Harvard, tons of stuff. And then over in in the nucleic acid synthesis industry of Twist Bioscience and Emerald Cloud Lab. And Kathleen McMahon from Balthus is on here. So good news, but obviously just an early step. This is just an open letter to the government saying, hey, we think you should— we want to support this. We think that the government should start thinking about this. The other news in the bio world.

Yeah, I mean, the news is just that there's incredible momentum in biotech.

It feels like biotech, uh, after momentum, but not like volume, not scale yet, because you're looking at $3 trillion IPOs going out this year potentially. So much news in AI. Micron's at a trillion. Every chip stock is, you know, in the hundreds of billions, trillions.

This is much smaller, but, but it's notable because biotech had been, uh left for dead in some ways. We had a biotech investor on probably 14 months ago at this point who said, I don't even know. I mean, just looking at the returns so far, I don't know why you would invest in this asset class. Yeah. Uh, but of course every asset class goes through that kind of phase, and clearly there's a lot of momentum, and they should be.

You would expect that biotech would be similarly power law driven, maybe not as extreme, but if you pull out SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic from— The power law is universal though. Yes, but I feel like the biotech community has a little bit more of a culture of base hits, doubles, triples, where they flip companies pretty frequently in the—

Yeah, we had that. Didn't we have a guy on that had sold—

Like 3 companies. We didn't have him on when we were doing—

$2 billion exits.

Yep. And then he joined another company and sold it for $3 billion the next day. And so—

So anyways, you have Isomorphic Labs spun out of uh, DeepMind, uh, Coinbase, uh, or not Coinbase, but, but Brian spun out or like founded NewLimit. Uh, you have RetroBot Sciences. They just raised a new round.

We're gonna get Jacob on the show as well for that.

Um, Altos Labs, uh, from Jeff the Chad from Amazon. Yeah, that's a funny post.

As this post puts it.

Uh, Jeff Bezos. Uh, Anthropic obviously acquired Coefficient Bio as well.

But Jensen and Larry Ellison at Oracle are also doing stuff. So There's a lot of activity. It's very fun, and I hope we're going to be able to cover this a lot more in the near future.

At what point does a Pfizer or Johnson Johnson start joining the press release economy of just coming— I'm not saying it'd be a good thing, but coming out and saying, "We believe we're right at the—" Because there are partnerships all the time that happen.

And they're always just tucked a little bit deeper in the Wall Street Journal because AI is dominating and even private credit takes the front seat to the bio news. But there's a whole bunch of dealmaking going on. Anyway, there's other dealmaking going on in fintech. We're going to talk about Ramp's raise today. What's going on in Ramp land? $44 billion valuation. Whoa. Really, really solid traction. Just every 12, 18 months, sometimes much quicker. Sometimes they do 2 rounds in 2 weeks, but really solid progress. They raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation. Last time we grew this fast, we were 1/20th of the size.

So this is the most notable thing to me. Yeah, uh, lots of chatter on the timeline around, uh, you know, other fintech valuations.

You compare that— apocalypse.

Yeah, well, yeah, you compare them to like, you know, Ramp is now worth more than PayPal. Okay, PayPal has $32 billion of revenue. Yeah, uh, but PayPal, uh, certainly has probably negative momentum, whereas RAMP has incredible momentum. And this is the standout line. They were 1/20th the size the last time they were growing this fast. And so, yeah, just really, really, really, really impressive execution and incredible opportunity still. Yeah.

So Eric took to the timeline, posted an essay about the third pillar comparing the previous eras of value creation, the two pillar pillars, uh, people and vendors, dating back to 600 BCE. If you're not thinking in millennia, what are you doing here? Tokens emerged as the third pillar in 2026 AD, and he calls it the quadrillion token blind spot. Boiled down 500 years of finance, and it's really just 3 questions: who spent what, was it worth it, what's the bill next month? I mean, people get caught up in all these crazy things. I mean, you see this like marketing, I'm sure, and, uh, ad buying where people will do all these crazy analyses and ROI, ROAS, and all this other stuff. And it's always useful to zoom out and just be like, okay, we spent a bunch of money. Did the bank balance go up in this company or not?

All personal and business finance at the end eventually comes down to, are we making more money than we're spending?

Yeah. And I think Eric is right to dive super deep into token optimization and thinking about the tools that they're building, but then at the same time, don't get lost the sauce and like actually zoom out and try and understand like what is the core value that you're delivering to your customer. Uh, it is answering that question. Um, so fantastic news over there. There's some other fundraising news. Sabe, the beanie BCI company, is getting preempted at $35 million at $500 million post. Uh, this is a leak from R for Rock. We'll see where it goes.

This is huge for you. Why?

Because you are a beanie guy. I do like beanies.

You love to throw on a beanie, a beanie in the morning.

Keeps it together. Yeah, yeah, like a beanie. Uh, very, very—

I— it's interesting. I think that, uh, this format— of course, I'm sure they can adapt it to other types of hats. Yeah, but this format certainly maybe makes it harder to build momentum in places like California, at least Southern California, Arizona. Be big amongst creative directors though. Yeah, huge, huge, huge potential. Uh, Silver Lake, Silver Lake.

Yeah, every It's not too hard to change your beanie into a hat, a cowboy hat. That's just extra leather around it. You could wrap the beanie in the cowboy hat.

Here's what's interesting though. So Arthur Rock, usually it's pretty dialed. Pretty dialed. Pretty dialed. It's almost like he has inside information. It's almost like he somehow got—

Yeah, but I mean, we've talked about the game theory of does he work at a real tier 1 venture capital firm? What's the benefit of leaking everything? Is he a lawyer that's seeing all the docs turn around? No, I mean, zero benefit for a lawyer. Right? Um, yeah, the rush of getting likes on the timeline is pretty universal. That's it. That's it.

Just like, I need a banger out of fund. Okay, for sure. Yeah. And, uh, I don't, I don't know anything else. Um, but, uh, he's always taken the view that it can be helpful to the founder to build because a bunch of people are going to see this, that this didn't sort of land in their deal flow or land on their desk. And they're gonna reach out, right? So it does create momentum, but, uh, can certainly be annoying for teams as well. Uh, this was notable though, so $200 million of, of LOI from B2B customers. And so very curious what the enterprise play is here.

Does that mean like, uh, like through hospital networks or through like the healthcare system, or is it like Mark Zuckerberg wants to go further? He wants to track the brainwaves of the employees.

Now we're gonna, we're gonna track your screen.

We're also gonna check your brain. I mean, it could go either way because you imagine like Neuralink has had a bunch of traction and a bunch of amazing— I saw Nolan, the first patient, P0, on Rogan talking about playing COD with the Neuralink. Amazing. And you can imagine that at a certain point, like some sort of partnership, they have multiple hat form factors. There we go. We're good.

I was getting really hung up on the beanie. Yeah. And like, there's so many different enterprise or B2B contexts. You're in a warehouse in Dallas, Texas in the summer.

Yeah. You don't know. Maybe this $200 million LOI is from REI or Patagonia. You don't know who makes beanies. What's the— Carhartt. Carhartt makes a great beanie. There we go. You don't know any of this stuff. You're completely out to lunch on the beanie economy.

Beanie economy. Anyway, beanie market map. Goldman.

Goldman, very optimistic.

What'd they say? Goldman expects SpaceX's AI revenue to surge 100 times by 2030. Huge. Uh, big, big number. I looked at this title and I was thinking like, okay, what's Groq's actual revenue today if you take out— Yeah. X.

What, what is their AI revenue today? Is it just Groq subscriptions plus Groq tokens? Do you include X subscriptions? Do you include, uh, cloud vendor and, and NeoCloud contracts? There's a bunch of different ways to measure it. The smaller the number, the easier it is to 100x. But we have seen other AI companies 100x revenues over 2 years, over 3 years, 4 years. Like the 100x has become— it's not a one-of-one scenario. Yeah, it's happened multiple times. And so, uh, we have seen these charts many times and, uh, if, if they execute well, this is entirely possible.

It is, it is extremely— other, other notable data points from the roadshow. Yeah, they, the forecast anticipates SpaceX making about $360 billion of capital expenditures through 2028. Uh, Jensen somewhere fist pumping, uh, very excited about that number. Be a new hyperscaler, should be unsurprising but very aggressive.

Yeah, and the new NVIDIA Foundation model is also live. Uh, we'll have to go to check it out and look at the model card soon, see how it's Benchmarking. But we got to move on to benchmark because there's new news in the benchmark world.

So, moment of silence.

Moment of silence.

Why is it for, uh, the, the end of an era?

I guess, I guess they have been very focused.

The last tier one that was a pure venture capital.

What did they get called again? Internet Boys or something? Oh, Soft Boys. There was some book about them that was very funny. But eBoys, eBoys, eBoys is a hit piece of a book title.

No, it's a fantastic book.

But the subtitle makes up for it. And it's a fantastic book. And it's a very interesting story where they actually let a journalist come in and see how they—

eBoys, the true story of the 6 tall men.

Yeah, see, he clearly wrote the subtitle and was like, I got to take the edge off of this. It's too glazy. I got to take it down a notch. And so he threw the eBoys in there.

But anyways, big moves from Benchmark. Clark has a scoop in the Journal. Benchmark has raised $2 billion, $2 billion, 2 new funds. Wow. And most notably, their first ever dedicated growth fund.

Hmm. Do they hire anyone who has experienced growth investing? Who could possibly do growth investing there? Someone who's maybe like at Bond Capital and then Founders Fund, then maybe Kleiner, like someone with that pedigree, with that kind of background. Yeah, it would be fantastic. Pretty good for growth investing.

Now that you say that though, yeah, Ev Randall.

Ev Randall, that's right. They did pick up— they did pick him up. They're almost thinking two steps ahead there.

Are they building their fund strategy now, their entire platform strategy around Ed Randall? Potentially, potentially. Austin-based podcaster Joe Rogan reportedly being considered for 60 Minutes.

60 Minutes, they're gonna have to call it 200 Minutes because he records long podcasts and 60 Minutes isn't enough for hundreds. It'll just be called Barry, if you're listening. Put us in, put us in the ring. We're ready to go. You need tech correspondent, business correspondent, someone who can just chop it up for 60 minutes. We do 60 minutes 3 times a day. We're ready to go. This is going to be light work for us, Barry. I'm ready. I'm ready. You could do 60 minutes right now. You could do 60 minutes tomorrow. You could do 60 minutes. You could do an extra 60 minutes easily. We're putting up 1,000 minutes a week. It's no problem.

We did consider that at one point early on. We thought, should we do basically a morning show. Oh yeah, take a 2-hour break and come back. Yeah, do another show.

Late night show. Yeah, late night show, maybe. Anyway, we should talk about the new Audi, the Nuvo Lari. Is this real? Motor1, this seems real. It's real. Uh, it's a big deal. It's the, it's the brand's first supercar since the R8. Twin turbocharged 4-liter V8 hybrid, 217 mile per hour top speed. That is 10% faster than a Cayenne Turbo GT. What is the Cayenne Turbo GT market doing right now? Is it tanking? Depreciation must be just through the roof on this news because you have a car that's 10% faster. And so why— everyone is going to be rotating out.

I mean, I, I think, I, I think the new Velar—

it's a really cool design. It's a really cool design.

Feels like somewhat Cybertruck, cyberpunk-y, futuristic.

I don't know, it just checks the box for like the next supercar for me. And, uh, in a way that the—

Ben says it can't touch the R8.

Oh, can't touch the R8. Okay. Okay, well, it goes 0 to 60 in 2.6 seconds.

Thank you for tuning in with us today, folks. We will be back on Monday. Yes, and we look forward to it.

Some business to do tomorrow, but see you Monday. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tbpn.com and have a wonderful weekend.

We'll see you later. Goodbye.

Goodbye.